Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008)
Watching the piece about her father leaving for war and her mother feeling very nervous and abandoned is resonating with my feelings of abandonment and wondering where they came from: was it when my parents were in their mid 20s and still studying with no jobs and my dad had to travel to Holland to pick tulips or Turkey to be a tourist guide but really to secretly sell and exchange clothes and other goods? I remember photos of my mum from that time and I remember her being really sad. I also felt abandoned when my parents divorced and my mum abandoned me for the company she started with my stepdad and my father abandoned me emotionally by pouring out his sorrows in front of me, a 10 year old. And then I was abandoned by my mother again at 15, when my little brother was born and she had a post natal depression and I know it wasn’t on purpose but I was abandoned nonetheless. And the final abandonment was by my first great love. So there were quite a few of those.
She’s one of those artists who made such an impact on me with her work but also her life experiences I read about in “The Baby on the Fire Escape” that I wanted to know more about her. And the more I learn the more connections I see: abandonment, shame, body insecurities, her fear of people quarelling(I hated my mums and stepdads fights, still do till this day, I hate it when my kids see me and my husband fighting), and wanting to work through all these issues in her art. But also, in the words from “The Baby on the Fire Escape”
“After the death of her husband in 1973, when she was sixty-one, her career took oft, as if the local representative of the patriarchy, however well-meaning, had to get out of the way before she could think her own thoughts. The next year she took imaginary revenge on both the parent who had belittled her and the family ideal that had eaten her brain, in an installation she called The Destruction of the Father. She claimed its abstract lumps of latex and plaster represented a patricidal family drama:
“At the dinner table, my father would go on and on, showing off, aggrandizing himself. And the more he showed off, the smaller we felt. Suddenly, there was a terrific tension, and we grabbed him-my brother, my sister, my mother-the three of us grabbed him and pulled him onto the table and pulled his legs and arms apart…. We ate him up.”
SEAMSTRESS.MISTRESS.DISTRESS.STRESS
I find it fascinating and deeply connect with the fact thet the motivation for Bourgeois work is her childhood and the anger. She says “it is really the anger that makes me work. All my work of the last 50 years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic. It has never lost its mistery and it has never lost its drama” I love the use of the word drama, has a similar weight to it as Rothko’s dramas, but it seems to give her power and make her more alive, whereas Rothko’s “drama” got him to the stage of absolute despair and depression so deep that in the end it killed him.
There is so much I feel I connect in with Bourgeois: the twists and the knots of fabric dyeing, they reveal the complexity of human life and growing up surrounded with fabrics and threads, the nostalgia when she moved to New York, feeling it deeply when I was living in LA for 3 years and was desperately missing Poland and started working with crafts people from the mountains and designing shoes and lace garments made by these craftspeople. Even now, living in London, working with the rainbow colours of polish folk stripes, recreating a diverse and tolerant version of my home country, which I would like it to be, which I have imagined and I am trying to connect to through my pieces. As if ultra catholic folklore of Polish countryside could be combined with the diversity and multiculturality of London.
“Goldwater was the temperament opposite from my father, in a very strange way in temperament he reminded me of my mother. And I have explained that when I talk about the spiders, a certain kind of temperament. The spiders are all over the place. The spiders have been my most successful subject. So I must be convincing. They must carry a message. A message of the temperament I love. The spider is an ode to my mother. To go a little further, it represents a reconciliation. That is to say, I try terribly hard to be the thinking and the calculating person that my mother was. Unfortunately I don’t make it very well and I am much more gifted and happy with the world of emotion that my father represented. So I’m torn apart between the two. I inherited my mother’s intellect and my father’s sick heart.” Relationship with her father was bitter. Her father “had never taken her seriously as an artist. She had not taken herself seriously as an artist. She didn’t believe she had it in her as an artist in a professional sense. And she was constantly doubting her abilities. And she had quite a lot of success by 1951, when her father died. She was often the only woman included in shows with the Abstract Expressionists.”
“She was a mother to two sons but I think had a terrible time doing it and not neccesarily did it very well. And all of this converged and when her father died it all came unstuck.”
I UNDO – “it’s about rupture. And it’s about travel, it’s about the journey
“The purpose of the pieces is to express emotions. My emotions are very bothersome to me because they are inappropriate. They’re inaproppriate to my size. My emotions are my demons. It is not the emotions themselves. It is the intensity of the emotions are much too much for me to handle. And that is why I reansfer them, I transfer the energy into sculpture. This applies to everything I do. It has nothing to do with the craft. It has nothing to do with the skills. It has nothing to do with the how to manage materials. Materials are only materials nothing more. The materials are not the subject of the artist. The subject of the artist is emotions and ideas. Both.”
